* * *
The sun is now lower in the sky, the air turned sharper. He reins in his coat and takes the path down towards the hollow. As he does so, a posse of spectres seems to gather up ahead, everyone dressed in black, trudging silently with head bowed. Significant, perhaps, that their final procession to the graveside has left impressions where the service before it has not. A younger Daniel had held back from this crowd, had never actually seen the coffin go down – only the mound of earth that marked the spot, days later, when the tombstone finally arrived. It was a plot some way back from the path, near to the boundary hedge, one of a handful of young graves on a site newly cleared. The same spot is approaching now, but the distinction is long gone. The passing years, the weather, the undergrowth, they have all made sure of that.
As the familiar moment to leave the path arrives, a disturbance in the grass draws Daniel’s eye. A cat stares up with murderous longing into the bushes where a robin is busy stripping berries – the perfect set for a budget Christmas card, given a gentle dusting of snow. Yet its resonances go somehow deeper. As it crouches there, eyes glued to its prize, this perfectly engineered creature of taut sinews and coil-spring muscle has no skeletons to hold it in check: no memories of the many kills it had witnessed as a kitten, or those long hungry waits for its mother’s return to the litter. There are no last minute changes of heart here, no questions, no remorse, no thoughts for the robin’s orphaned fledglings, just blissful, blameless instinct. A woman’s voice reverberates through the air. The boy by the Christmas tree looks up from beneath a magician’s hat to see his mother, something stopping her dead in her tracks. She has frozen with horror, is too terrified to breathe. In her eyes burns a look of fear that no child could ever forget; an accusatory stare never to be forgiven. He’s stepping now through the long grass; the cat scarpers, furious and frightened, leaving an enduring presence that goes beyond either phantoms or felines. Is someone else keeping vigil down here? Are they covertly watching him? A hundred mourners could be lurking among these shadows and not be seen. As the gravestone’s simple profile emerges from behind another its front face seems oddly obscured. A large bundle sits propped against it. Daniel quickens his pace; he slows again and stops, his brain struggling to unravel the shape.
Recognition is sudden and shocking.
“Oi, you, what d’you think you’re doing?” He’s already shouting the rebuke as the self-doubt kicks back. It’s nothing but a large refuse sack. Someone has been clearing the undergrowth, removing litter or thinning the hedging, and simply stacked it there for collection. But another two steps, and the bundle re-forms as a person once more; no question this time; a male crouching on the grave, his forehead pressed up against the stone, arms slightly forward, his hands out of view.
“You! Get the hell off there.”
But the intruder takes no notice, only continues staring down at the ground, determined to finish whatever he’s doing. The idea that this man might be relieving himself, on the verge of throwing up or even, god forbid, masturbating, is just too disgusting to contemplate. Whatever is going on here, it’s a blasphemy, a personal attack, an affront to the George family name. Already Daniel is onto the grass and going for the man’s collar.
“I said off there, fucker.”
And at once it’s plain that the man is not desecrating the grave at all. He’s simply squatting – more precisely, kneeling – stiff as a board. When grabbed, he offers no defence; his head grazes the stone as the body topples, rigid as a statue. When dragged through the undergrowth his eyes never open. As Daniel finally lets go and stares down ruefully at the heap before him the terrible possibility dawns that this man might actually be dead.
For nearly an hour Daniel has been brooding over death and memories of death, but to stumble upon it like this – to have it laid out at one’s feet – nobody has set out the protocols. What are the rules? Does he take action – administer first-aid – run for help – or simply walk away? If he just leaves, sooner or later a churchwarden, a passer by or the vicar himself is going to find the man, any of whom would be only too delighted to do the Christian thing. But what if someone has witnessed the rough handling? Daniel may have been recognised. Besides, the man wears no coat, only thin jeans and a pullover, both soaked through. It promises to be a long and cold night ahead for someone in such a sorry state to be hanging on for salvation. A different kind of chill now begins to fuse Daniel’s bones. For a moment he’s that child again, making twisted paper chains in a stuffy room with something icy gnawing at his belly. It’s the child’s voice that tells him there is no way of turning his back on this tonight.
Okay, but some basic checks need to be made before going for help. Ensure that he’s breathing; make him as warm and comfortable as possible; remove any hints of having been dragged about. Daniel is about to set to it when a voice – the first he’s heard in over forty-eight hours – makes him gasp and pull back. He wheels around to find a woman standing on the path a little way off, her small body framed by the silhouette of the church, like an angel sent down in judgement.
“Sorry,” she cries. “I hope I didn’t… Oh! Is everything all right there?”
A thick coat, headscarf and gloves cover all but the full moon of her face, across which the guilty verdict is already spreading like a cloud. Daniel is half inclined to tell her to get lost, to mind her own business, but a kind of divine authority in the way she holds herself prevents him. He takes another step backwards and opens his arms.
“I just found him. I think he’s hurt: unconscious.”
“I’d better take a look then,” she says. “I have nursing experience.”
Nursing experience; the phrase turns over in Daniel’s head. Little wonder then that she’d made him wary – the number of times the medical profession has let him down over the years. Still, he’s committed to it now and is nodding her over. She then does something very simple, but enough to soften his hardness towards her. As she crosses the grass to join him she makes the smallest detour to avoid treading over the grave.
He moves aside to let her kneel down before the man.
‘Nursing experience’. What does she mean? A student in training perhaps, but a second glance suggests she’s rather too old for that. Someone struck off for dereliction of duty? Unlikely – too diligent, too high in moral fibre. Then maybe a person so disillusioned with the NHS that she’s quitted her job. Or a poor girl forced to acquire her ‘nursing experience’ by caring for some decrepit relative until they finally had the decency to drop dead. That at least was something he could relate to. She has bent down with her face close to the man’s right ear and is gently shaking his shoulder.
“Do you know his name?” she quizzes. Daniel shrugs. She shakes again. “Hello, can you hear me?”
He watches her remove her headscarf and put one ear to the man’s nose.
“He’s alive. But his breathing is awfully shallow.”
Now she runs a hand under his shirt collar and feels the skin beneath.
“The poor man’s absolutely frozen. And soaked to the skin. We really need to get him off the grass.”
Daniel steps forward only to be told to wait. The authority figure again. First, she must see if it’s safe for the man to be moved. She examines the wound across his head, checks his face and begins a fingertip search of his bones, working methodically down the body with incredible care, as though the limbs might come away in her hands. It grants him time to study her more closely. Even in the half-light he can see that she’s dark, both her hair and skin. She could be Greek. In the few words she’s spoken he’d caught the trace of an accent, but no, Greek didn’t quite cut it. Spanish, maybe. His age, or thereabouts – thirty-something – quite tall, not pretty, but a certain touch of class. The type he could maybe even fancy, in an odd sort of way.
“Well, there’s nothing broken, as far as I can tell. He’s grazed his head on one side and maybe bumped his face, but I think it’s now okay to move him.”
>
“Onto the path?”
She shakes her head, climbing to her feet and for some reason emptying her pockets. She strips off her coat – apparently oblivious to the plunging temperatures – and lays it against the man’s side. “I want to put him into the recovery position. Would you call for an ambulance while I do that?”
Daniel looks away with a shiver. “I haven’t got a phone.”
“No,” she laughs, “of course. A cemetery is hardly the place to be making phone calls.”
She reclaims the one she’s just squeezed into a back pocket and offers it to him, but Daniel declines. She can ring, he says. He can do recovery positions; he’s watched it done a hundred times. If she takes this as some outpouring of Samaritan spirit then in truth it’s just the lesser of two evils. 999 calls get recorded. Under the circumstances he’d rather not be on the system. And he really does know about the recovery position. A home-help had shown him years ago as a precaution. Even so, all this has clearly thrown the girl. She fumbles her words when indicating which way he should turn the patient. She might have saved herself the worry; Daniel is well aware which side of the man’s head caught the edge of the stone.
“Yes, ambulance please…”
He brings one of the man’s arms out towards him across the girl’s coat, reaches under the furthest knee and yanks it upwards.
“…Hello, can we have an ambulance to St Bartholomew’s Church cemetery, north entrance… Sorry? No, no, the other one, on Cooper’s Hill…”
As he brings the other arm across the chest and pulls on the raised knee, the man’s own weight rolls him over onto his side.
“…We’ve found an unconscious man here. Yes, he’s breathing, but only just. There are head injuries. My number…”
Daniel needs the man’s free hand to become a makeshift pillow, but the fist remains tightly clenched. In prising the fingers apart he allows something – a ball of paper – to fall into the grass. Daniel quickly retrieves it. The paramedics will be here soon, and the girl is hardly likely to let him frisk this guy for ID. The paper may be the one clue to his identity, and why that particular gravestone had been his target. Even when smoothed out, the paper is too crumpled for the words, written in blue ink, to be legible. He turns the paper over to discover it’s an old photo; a family snapshot, very faded and hard to make out in the gloom.
The woman is covering her mobile with one hand and calling to him.
“Check he’s still breathing, will you? Hello, sorry, yes, we’ll stay with him. Rahmani. R-A-H-M-A-N-I. Gulnaz Rahmani. Yes, of course. Thank you. Goodbye.
“And put your coat over him.”
Daniel gawps at her. He might have told her where to get off had she not already donated her own. Instead, a muddled sense of chivalry kicks in; something about gentlemen laying their cloaks across puddles for ladies with dainty ankles to step in their flowing silks.
She snaps shut her phone. “They’re on their way.”
“I bloody hope so,” he grumbles, hugging himself and blowing hot breath into his hands. It takes less than a minute to decide his noble act had been premature. What gentlemen chose to do with their cloaks was their affair.
“Bugger this. I’ve got a better idea.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the church – to get something else to cover him with.”
He leaves the woman to monitor her patient and hurries back along the path. An old robe in some back room should do it. Or they can requisition one of those tapestries. Failing that, there is of course always the altar cloth.